I thought I knew all about Bunker Hill, but then I read “Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution,” by historian Nathaniel Philbrick – and realized I knew very little. My colleague Barry Osborne, who is now reading the book, had the same reaction. His father grew up in Boston, and Barry went on a family trip to Bunker Hill when he was 6 years old. “That trip, and the history of Bunker Hill, had a pivotal place in my childhood memories,” he told me. “But I really knew very little about the personalities behind it.”

That could be what attracted Ben Affleck, who has optioned the book for film – a lively narrative of pre-revolutionary Boston, with 15,000 citizens caught up in a cycle of increasing tension that climaxed in 1775 with the Battle of Bunker Hill, the first major battle of the American Revolution.

The best-selling author, who won the 2000 National Book Award for “The Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex,” will speak at the Tattered Cover on Monday, May 20, reconstructing that ideological and geographical landscape with rich detail and stories of people long lost to history.

One of the book’s main characters is Joseph Warren, aptly described by Barry as “a forgotten Founding Father.” After all, everyone knows John Adams, Sam Adams and John Hancock – but who remembers Joseph Warren?

He was a 33-year-old physician who led the patriots on the ground – the guy who gave Paul Revere the orders to send out the alarm that British troops were headed to Concord, a major general with a “swashbuckling personal magnetism” who was elected President of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and oversaw the organization of the new Continental Army.

“His seemingly limitless capacity for work, along with his unmatched ability to adapt his own actions to meet the demands of the moment, meant that as the speed of events began to increase…he was inevitably looked to as the person to keep the patriot cause together,” writes Philbrick.

Warren, who grew up selling milk from the family farm in Roxbury, began his studies at Harvard University at age 14, became a doctor, and was grand master of the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Masons–the society that became the secret cell of the patriot cause, where the details of the Boston Tea Party were said to be worked out in December 1773.

The book covers the 18 months that followed the Boston Tea Party, looking at the vigilantes who frightened people in Boston with their violence, and at the more level-headed patriots who eventually decided to rebel against the British, who’d overtaken their city.

The fighting at Lexington and Concord comes to life with portraits of the people of the countryside – yeoman farmers in “floppy-brimmed hats, baggy, dark-colored coats, gray homespun stockings, and buckled cowhide shoes…with their powder horns slung from their shoulders.”
And then there’s the Battle of Bunker Hill, which actually took place on Breed’s Hill, almost half a mile to the southeast. The bloodiest battle of the Revolution, it was the place where several hundred militia men, running disastrously low on gunpowder, until the British were 15 yards away and they could see “the whites of their eyes,” killing or wounding almost half the British force. Ultimately, the citizen soldiers ran out of gunpowder and had to retreat, but showed that the ragtag colonial militia was willing to stand up to the well-trained British regulars, and foretold their ultimate victory.

This book is the latest installment of Philbrick’s narrative of how the colonies became the United States, which began with the Pulitzer-nominated “Mayflower,” about the ship’s voyage and the settlement of Plymouth Colony. He will speak at the Tattered Cover, 2526 E. Colfax, on Monday, May 20 at 7:30 p.m.